Green fingers passed me by

11:31am Wednesday 26th March 2008

HOW does anybody get to be a gardener?

Is it a secret society, like that of women who know how to blow-dry their hair or get their make-up on straight? How does anyone have the guts to get going in the first place? And how do they even know where to start?

I have a friend who's in on the secret, and few things in life are more relaxing than simply sitting on her manicured lawn on a sunny afternoon and watching the bees hard at work on a bank of her magnificent flowers.

She even has a prolific vegetable garden, something that inspires a stomach-wrenching envy within me, but she won't spill the metaphorical beans when I ask her, over a bowl of home-produced salad, how she got the gardening instinct.

She just says vaguely that her parents must have taught her, and that is probably as true as it is galling. Her parents had fruit trees in the garden; mine had builder's rubble, and paintbox-tinted earth that my father claimed was the result of a chemical factory having once stood on the site. Two good reasons not to get out there with a spade; and sure enough, he hardly ever did.

I've had a garden of my own for about ten years now, but I'm too terrified to do anything with it. It has the spring bulbs that were in it when we first arrived, and a straggly pot of sage that I did manage to plant in a rush of early enthusiasm, but the thyme and mint that I planted with it have confounded their hardy reputation by withering and dying off.

Green fingers having clearly passed me by, I have tried to educate myself instead. I bought books and scratched my head over what could possibly grow in that dark, wet, cloying ground at the bottom of the garden. As far as I could make out, nothing but fairies could thrive there.

I suffered attention deficit disorder the second I saw anything that looked like a gardener's year plan. Too many variables: which way your house faces, how sheltered or exposed the area, how acid or alkaline the soil. It was like being back in fourth-form physics, where I spent most of my time day-dreaming about that sixth-former who won all the races at school sports day.

You'd think telly would help. Certainly the mysteries of cooking seem to reveal themselves when you watch a recipe being cooked before your eyes.

But if I switch on to watch Monty Don or Alan Titchmarsh explaining why their favourite gardens work, instead of concentrating on what is being said, I just drift off, thinking about how lovely they look (the gardens, not Messrs Don and Titchmarsh).

Maybe there's hope for me, though. On Easter Monday, when my gaze settled yet again on the twisted, neglected shrubs that had been rotting mournfully at the end of our lawn for months, something within me snapped. I put on my scruffiest clothes, grabbed a fork from the shed and cleared out the lot. It felt fantastic, cathartic. I ached the next day - some of those shrubs had quite a root system - but the sense of achievement was still there. I had broken my gardening duck.

Now I know I can make a difference, I am toying with the idea of putting something in the empty bed where once the offending shrubs stood. If I can actually make something grow as well as putting it to death, maybe I'll have caught the bug.

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